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Sunday, February 12, 2017

Light And Heat

Increasingly Enlightened,

"Lost in the Political Wilderness", is the first in a series by Mike Kreiger, giving a human-development context to the Red-Blue war between the most hated candidates Republicans and Democrats had to offer, and the class-war going on in the western world. It's largely rich vs poor, but it is fragmented, tribal and has aspects of "religion", too. Mike found that there was too much 'splainin to do for this to go in one essay, so it's 5 essays, which he featured daily last week.

Mike explains the human development paradigm called "Spiral Dynamics", which Ken Wilbur is the main proponent of these days.

Mike does a bang-up job, too. I tried really hard to read Ken Wilbur for a couple of months, about 15 years ago, this very paradigm.

I was able to read something like 150 pages, skipped around searching, and set the book down for longer and longer. Ken just kept explaining the model in more and more intricate detail, and never gave any real-world application to pull it all together.

I just couldn't hold that big and new and detailed of a mental set in purely abstract form.

Outrageous Malevolence is Ilargi's update on the "Greeks situation". German and French banks took on covertly and illegally originated Greek debt, specially packaged by Goldman Sachs, to get Greece into the EU, by obfuscating the reality of (corrupt) Greek government finances.

After the financial collapse in 2008, a lot of things started coming to light, and this bad-debt problem of those powerful banks needed to be transferred to somebody else.

The people least able to carry that load were scapegoated with the odious-debt.

Greeks are more crushed than ever, completely stuck in the worst phase of America's Great Depression.

The Eurocrats need them to be bled drier, say they are doing better than the IMF claims, and can generate a 3.5% primary surplus from taxing people who make $8000/year, and expanding those taxes to people who make $4000/year soon. Of course folks already pay very high "value added" taxes, taxes on utilities, property taxes, etc.

These people are innocent, and have always been innocent. Bankers and Politicians did the crime. It is really no secret.

Eurasian Solution for Afghanistan? (Damn! It's about time...) Thanks Eleni, for this excellent article. Russian diplomacy is at work again, as all of Afghanistan's neighbors are coming together with Afghan parties to confer about how an arrangement can be worked out to bring and end to the war, which has gone on for more than 30 years. (Afghanistan was "paradise" in the 1970s when a friend of mine trekked through there, and "Hell" when another friend of mine went there on a "brown bag" (cash pay) mission for the CIA decades later. The US is invited as a "partner", and might have a face-saving way out, if Trump, Mattus and friends are willing to take it.

This is presented as a Pakistani plan. I'm sure there is some diplomatic reason for casting it in that light.

Rand Paul warns neocons will scurry in with Abrams. Kristol says that's "anti-Semitic". (Whatever... Latest rumor is that Elliot Abrams is out of the running for Asst. Sec. of State for dissing candidate-Trump so badly.)

Anti Donald Trump War Propaganda, Thierry Meyssan goes back to 9/11/01 and the videos of Donald Trump's same day structural assessments and conclusions about other explosives being absolutely necessary to have done what was just done. Trump had been in the WTC basement after the previous massive van-bombing, observed the damage witha structural engineer he employed, who had been a project engineer in the design and construction of the WTC. The whole "with us or with the terrorists" rejection of contrary-truths had not been established yet that afternoon. Meyssan did one of the early and most influential 9/11 documentaries. He had been there that day filming something else, until...

Civil Asset Forfeiture is the big issue that Donald Trump went off half-cocked about when he was talking to that Texas Sheriff and offering to ruin the career of a Texas Senator who was trying to protect people from having all cash and valuables taken by police at all levels, without any proof that it was obtained unlawfully, or contributing to criminal enterprise. This is really huge in America. Trump should have known, and the media should present this issue, but does not. Anyone with cash is a criminal. You know that...

A new composite material has a very high reflectance of visible light, but permits infrared/heat to readily pass through. The obvious application is to keep a roof from heating in the sun, but to let any heat it does have from the house below, to be radiated out, anyway.